Math and science is not dependent on gender, it is dependent on knowledge and research. Marie Curie was a pioneer in the study of radiological materials. She didn’t succeed because she was a woman, but because she worked at it.
Not the least because she could work all night ...
...because she brought her own light with her.
Marie Curie, frankly, is not a very important physicist. She gets more press than she deserves for two reasons: 1) she was French at a time when France was dominating science and math and 2) she's a woman, and women are rare in the field.
There are other posts on this thread detailing why this is so. Women are less likely to be geniuses than men. That cuts them off of the top end. They are far less likely than men to be mathematical geniuses. That cuts them out of mathematics, physics, and a good bit of the hard sciences and engineering.
For every Marie Curie there are a hundred Pierre Curies. That's the fact.
Pretending that this isn't true is nonsense and needs to stop. The Chinese are not doing this. They promote on the basis of meritocracy, not an insistence that there be 50% females in a field that they a) aren't interested in for the most part and b) aren't competitive in when they are.
We ought to have no barriers to great theoreticians like Amy Noether (a much more imprtant contributor than Marie Curie) or fine experimentalists like Curie. But we should not kid ourselves that there is a gender equality of talent in this field. There isn't.
Just the way this is tee'd up give the game away: ...a "highly offensive" presentation about the role of women in physics, the BBC has learned.
Oh my gosh, the BBC has just learned...
Pffft... fake news.